Independence Day

Is it the "4th" or the "Forth" of July?


I don't know about you, but I've pretty much excelled at doing virtually nothing so far this holiday weekend, and loved every minute of the wasted time.

Wait, let me check and think for a minute...

Yeap...I'm pretty sure that if you don't count cooking and drinking and breathing, I've been pretty successful (at doing nothing since Friday.) We've had family in town visiting from the Pittsburgh area since Thursday night so I've had to modify my normal nocturnal schedule to keep up with everyone and be a good host and thus the computer work and blogging has been suffering a little as a result I guess.

I just noticed I even avoided finding anything to write about on Saturday and with the exception of this posting I almost missed Sunday also.

Go figure...

In local news...we're up to our eyeballs with tomatoes around here right now. I've planted five different varieties which have all been growing for about nine weeks now and some of the plants are over 6 feet tall and I'm picking somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen tomatoes every day.

I have some "fifty day" middle sized plants which have been producing for a couple of weeks, and this week my Purple Heirloom and giant "Best Boy" plants have started coming in, and I still have another generic plant I bought on sale at the grocery store and three Romano plants I started from seeds this spring which have yet to bear any fruit.

Then today I noticed that my Squash plants are finally setting a few Squash and the little Cucumbers are coming in two or three at a time each day and all in all life's just plain good here in Eastern Tennessee at the Turbo Pup Compound.

Vegetable gardening has always been a hit or miss endeavor for me until this year because I either was just plain lazy or didn't have the time and resources to plant a decent garden.

But this old house has had large garden plots all around it since the early 1960's under the previous owner's auspices, and all I had to do this year was bust up the ground and plant whatever I wanted and then do a little watering and wait a couple of months and here we are.

I felt like that it would have been some sort of crime for us to NOT use the fertile earth to make some stuff to put on a few sandwiches and in some salad bowls when we didn't have anything else to do.

And back to the 4th of July, in spite of all of the crap in the news showing angry stupid people bitching and complaining about everything and anything, I'm dang proud of our Country in whatever shape and form the idiots in Washington DC try to morph it into, and I'm glad I was born in the USA, in Lower Alabama a couple of decades after WWII and have had the opportunity to succeed or fail based on my own ability and efforts rather than waiting around for the "officials" to reach into someone else's pocket and hand me cash.

No matter what the laws say today or will say 20 years from now, I'm as independent as I want to be in my own soul...and my soul is the last thing I'll surrender on Independence day or any other day on the calendar.

I wish a few more people twenty or thirty years yonger than me could understand this simple concept...without listining to the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and thinking they have it hard in life.

God Bless America...